1950S SMALL TOWN LIFE/CHANG SINGS AT CHURCH

God must have had a special concern for Chang, letting him end up at our house.  If he had shown up a few months earlier, before Julie died, we would have loaded him up in the pickup and taken him to the animal shelter right away.  As it was, he showed up, acted really tacky to all of us, growling, stealing the hounds' food, barking at us in our own driveway, and generally making himself unwelcome, and we still let him stay. 

He was a chow, who had thick golden fur that stood out around his neck like a fluted collar.  His walk was more of a strut, but he ran if someone approached him, and you could tell then, by the way he put his head down, that someone had been mean to him.  He had a secret he couldn't tell us in words, but his behavior spoke for him.

I had tried for several weeks to approach him.  Eventually, he let me come closer, with  dogfood.  One day, as he ate, I moved near him and gently reached out, touching his fur.  He kept eating.  I stood quietly.  When he finished, he didn't run away, just walked away regally with his fur neckring sticking out like a hedge of protection. 

That was the beginning of an uneasy relationship that lasted several years.  It also marked the first time that I became strongly aware of my tendencies toward obsessive - compulsive actions, especially as they related to germs. 

Chang had only been hanging around the house two months or so when his lovely fur started dropping off in hunks.  I first noticed it one day when I fed him, and within three days, he had lost most of the fur on the left side of his body.

"Mange," Daddy pronounced when he came home from Lubbock on the weekend.

"What do we do?" I asked, feeling like I wanted to cry.

"That dog is mean.  I don't know how anyone is going to get to him to treat the mange.  We probably need to get rid of him."

"No," I begged.  "Let me keep him.  I'll put the medicine on him.  He'll let me."  I acted more sure than I felt that the dog would let me touch him.  He had let me pet him at times, but I had to approach him very carefully, and he stayed in control, not me. 

Daddy got the medicine on the weekend, and I started the treatment on Monday after he'd left for Lubbock.  Thank goodness he didn't see what it entailed. 

First, I had to feed Chang, but not really let him have the feed in the usual spot out by the garage.  I had to get the feed and lure him into the fenced yard, at the front of the house, through the gate, topped by two small gray metal lions, a small fancy decorative item on an otherwise plain chainlink fence.  Once I got him in the yard, which was no small feat, I had to actually let him eat his food.  Otherwise he'd never trust me again.

When he was nearly through, I slipped onto the high concrete porch and retrieved the "treatment" which was liquid thankfully and prepared in a used liquid dishwashing bottle.  I edged near him and poured a little of the mixture on the raw skin.  As soon as it hit his skin, he was off, running toward the gate, which I had smartly closed. 

When he realized I had tricked him, he ran east until there was no more yard, only fence.  When he turned north, I was there ready and shot a stream of medicine at his pitiful coatless body.  He ran west then and I patiently waited until he had to come past me once more when I squirted the rest of the treatment toward him.  Then I opened the gate and let him out.  He ran, shaking as hard as he could, drops of medicine glistening in the sun like tiny diamonds. 

I could hardly believe it, but each day we repeated the ritual.  I felt he was wise to me, but he never let on, entering the gate skittishly each day just as he had the day before.  Running from me every day like the day before.  Eventually, his mange cleared up and his lovely thick coat was restored like new.

Only as his mange got better, my obsessive compulsiveness got worse.  In treating him, I had become terrified that I would get mange.  I envisioned clumps of hair falling out, my raw skin, rough and scaly, revealed at school to disgusted schoolmates who pointed and jeered.

To counteract the terror, I  developed a very intense cleansing ritual for my hands and arms.  After each time I put medicine on Chang, I washed my hands with soap, dried them carefully, washed them again, dried them, then applied pure alcohol to each hand numerous times.  Sometimes, if I still "felt" the germs on there, I had to go through the whole process again.  It could be burdensome.

Chang wasn't really any problem except when he got into a crisis where he needed help.  Then no one could do anything with him at all, and it became an embarrassment.  Thankfully, the one time we needed to take him to the vet after he got bitten on the nose by a copperhead or watermocassin, causing his nose to swell up, he was too sick to care as we loaded him up in the floorboard of the car and took him to Dr. Harper for a shot.  Normally, though, no one could get him to do anything except what he wanted.

A few weeks after Chang had mange,  my dad decided to ride Sugar, our horse, to church.  I'm not sure what the impetus for that was, maybe the beautiful spring day, with its clear sun and cool breeze.  He never did it before, and after what happened, he certainly never did it again, but he saddled up. And since Mother and we girls had gone earlier to Sunday School, we watched in consternation as he trotted up, riding high and proud in the saddle, his white cowboy hat bouncing up and down with every step.

We attended literally a one -room church.  No bathrooms, except some old ones outside that no one would use unless it was a dire emergency.  No air conditioning.  The front doors (which were at the back of the pews) were the only doors, and the wooden doors stood open, leaving the screened doors to let in the breeze. 

Our friends giggled, and so did we, as Daddy tethered Sugar to the metal handrails by the steps.  I looked toward Mother and saw her glance out the front door and have no reaction, like it was the most natural thing in the world.  At the break between Sunday School and church, all the adults slapped Daddy on the back and acted like it was the greatest thing ever that he rode his horse to worship.

Brother Johnny led the singing on Sunday,  and we sang a variety of songs, but almost every week, we sang "At Calvary."  He stepped up behind the pulpit and after a brief piano intro, launched into the song.  "Years I spent in vanity and pride," he sang, swinging his arm in time with the music. 

"Aaaauuhrrrrr," a terrible high pitched sound came from the doorway.  "Aaaauuhrrr, aaaauuhrr."

It seemed like slow motion as just about every head in that small congregation turned back toward the doors.  There, with his nose pointed straight up, like a coyote howling at the moon, sat Chang, making weird and unusual noises,  accompanying the hymn. 

Daddy, realizing Chang had followed them like a private detective, keeping his distance so as not to be seen, got up and went back and tried to shush him, but of course he wasn't having any of it and seemed to get louder and more insistent.  The sound was sad and mournful, but everyone was laughing.  Finally, Brother Johnny finished two verses and said, with a dour look ,  that was all we'd sing for now.  All we kids had hung our heads and were giggling, punching each other, and shaking with suppressed laughter. 

Daddy slipped out and untied Sugar, and the entire congregation watched him through the south windows as he rode toward home.  It was only a mile.  I'm not sure, but it didn't seem like he was sitting as high in the saddle on the way back.

 He never liked Chang, and that episode sure didn't endear him.  A few weeks later, we arrived home early from church and found a friend of dad's with a rope around Chang trying to get him in a truck.  We were never sure what that was about, but had a pretty good idea.  Of course Jan and I staged a duet, a screaming, crying fit,  and once more Chang avoided capital punishment.

 He lived several more fairly happy years with us, teaching us lessons about dealing with difficult personalities.   I was never sorry he experienced some years of kindness, which he did, with the exception of the rope incident.  Even that day,  he saw how we would stick up for him even if he was hard to deal with, though  he never did anything to demonstrate he was grateful.   We all cried the day he died, hit by a car he was trying to bluff into stopping,  and though I didn't want to admit it,  there was, with my shock and sorrow,  also a sense of relief. 

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/JULIE GOES AWAY

"Honey," Aunt Kate said, her honeysweet voice kind and soothing.   "If there's a dog heaven, I know Julie's in it."  She wasn't our aunt, but she wanted to be called that.  And her voice always sounded the same way:  sweet, smooth, unruffled.  I knew Aunt Kate, a pillar of the tiny church we attended, didn't believe that animals went to heaven, but she said it to try to make me feel better.

At that, I burst into more tears.  My face was red and splotched.  I didn't "cry pretty" like some people.  It was an ugly sight.  My nose stopped up, my eyes swelled, and I looked a mess.  I wished I could cry like the women in the movies who dabbed at their eyes and noses, their facial features unmarred and perfect. 

"But I didn't get to say goodbye to her," I wailed.  "They took her to the vet, and they never brought her home.  They didn't even ask me!"  There was a brief lull as I thought of more indignation and hurt.  "And she was just staring at me when she left with them.  Just staring at me from over the back of the tailgate like she didn't even know me," I sobbed.  "She was droolin' real  bad."

"Honey, she had sleepin' sickness.  There's no gettin' over that.  Your mama and daddy did what they thought was best.  They knew she wud'n gonna get well.  It was for the best."  She took my snotty hands in her soft, plump ones, held them both in one and patted with the other. 

"Why don't you try some of this coconut cake Aunt Kate brought ya'll?  I made it this morning when I heard about Julie.  I know you loved that puppy.  She was a real sweet girl."

I had cried so long I'd about made myself sick.  To date, Julie's death was the most grievous thing I had ever experienced.  Julie didn't demand anything.  She played if I wanted to play, rested if I wanted to rest, and Jan and I had her chase us just about every night that she lived, growling, shaking the llama houseshoes we ran in, like her life depended on killing them. 

I loved sneaking to the door every night to let her in, and the light pressure of her body as she jumped on the foot of the bed and settled down on the tops of my feet. Her light snoring and tiny grunts and yelps were comforting night sounds.  Occasionally, when she slept during the day, we laughed at her little yips, like she was having a bad dream.

Mother came into the kitchen about that time.  She'd been doing something, but I wondered what, since she always spent time with Aunt Kate when she visited.  She'd helped her up the front steps, since Aunt Kate was round and elderly.  She'd taken the cake and put it in the kitchen-then she disappeared for about five minutes.

Aunt Kate, with her twisted gray hair and perfect powdered face, looked like she could have come out of a tintype formal portrait.  She always wore a dress; her soft hairdo swept up and framed that face, that  etching of  human kindness.

Mother didn't like for her children to cry.  Maybe that's why she so rarely told us no, or don't, or stop.  It made her uncomfortable.  She wasn't one to dig deep into the emotions.  Pragmatic, she just thought people, including children,  had to buck up and deal with whatever came their way.

 My grandmother Nettie told me once it was just mother's way, not necessarily a bad way, just her way.  She'd grown up with a mother who wouldn't sign her report card, making her wait till her dad could do it.  Since he worked the evening shift, the kids always had to take their cards a day late.   "Kids don't understand mental illness,"  she'd said, so they just had to find ways to make it okay.  Mother's method was just to ignore it and push on .  It worked pretty well for her, but I needed more. 

I know Mother would never have called Aunt Kate to talk to me, but since Aunt Kate had shown up, she just more or less let it happen.  And it worked.  I sniffled a few more minutes, but I felt encouraged that Julie had made such a good impression on her.  And I accepted her assessment of sleeping sickness.  Julie couldn't have lived drooling like that and staring at people.  It would have scared them. 

Aunt Kate slipped the knife  through the three layer cake and placed her scrumptious creation on a dish Mother had bought at Safeway.  It was blue and white and featured an idyllic country scene with a picturesque house.  "Here, sweetie," she said kindly.  "Eat this.  You'll feel better."

Going against what I believed to be true, I allowed myself to picture Julie running on top of a puffy white cloud, bounding  forward awkwardly  like she always did.  Abruptly I saw her stop, front legs splayed, and there in a little indentation of the cloud was a llama houseshoe.  If there was a dog heaven, she would be happy there.

I took a big bite of cake, savoring the rough texture of the coconut and the sweetness.   Sudddenly I felt certain I could be me again, stop crying and move forward.

 "That's better, isn't it?" Mother asked me, but I think it was more of a statement.  She didn't wait for an answer, getting saucers for herself and Aunt Kate.  "Want some coffee, Kate?" she asked, already gathering the cups.   

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/THE RUNAWAY

A few years after we moved to Corbet, I ran away from home.  Well, to be  exactly accurate, I didn't actually do it, but I intended to. 

I almost never got mad at Mother, but I think we were talking about when I got to do certain things that made me feel more grown up, and we did not agree about the when of things.  Apparently it affected me much more than it did her, for even though in a childish rage I pulled out all the drawers in the dresser and left my clothes hanging haphazardly out of their normal places, setting up a scene that would instantly relay to her that I was gone,  she never came to our end of our long ranchstyle house to check on me.

Standing waiting behind the door lost its appeal after about ten minutes.  I had  hoped to hear her open it and lament loudly (maybe even cry ) about my having run away.  I had planned to step from behind the door, reassure her that I was no longer mad (now that she was properly upset about my absence), she would say she was sorry, and all would be well again.

Eventually, I refolded the clothes, put them back in their proper places, gently slid the drawers back in place, and opened the bedroom door into the hall.  My anger, now a sputter replacing an open throttle, left me mopey, but chastened.  I drug my loafers on the carpet with each step, scraping minute bits of black suede off the toes onto the champagne colored carpet.  I expected Mother to be in the kitchen, because after all, what parent would leave the house when their kid might be running away?

Jan was sitting at the kitchen table eating a piece of chocolate cake.
"What's wrong with you?" she asked, but I wasn't sure if she really wanted to know or was just making a comment about how morose I looked.    

I contemplated how much to tell her.  Maybe I should just keep it all to myself-- but I couldn't.  I never could keep things to myself. 

"Well, I was going to run away from home--I sort of did -- but Mother didn't even come to check on me," I groused.

She observed me for a few seconds, about like you'd glance at a sewage plant pointed out on  a lake tour.  "Why'd you do that?" she asked,  nonchalantly, focusing again on her food, cutting a big bite of cake.

Suddenly all the drama I'd felt and enacted seemed petty and stupid.

"That's pretty stupid," she said as if reading my mind.  "I hope you straightened up your side of the room," she laughed.

We shared a room with twin beds, and it was like it was divided by the prime meridian, her side messy, mine neat, except for the slightly grimy spot where Julie slept each night at the foot of my bed.

"Where's Mother?"  I wanted to know; I just wasn't sure I wanted to see her right now.

"Oh, she's outside on the patio reading the paper.  She said it was such a pretty day she didn't want to waste it all inside.  She'd always rather be outside than in, you know that.  She's sitting out there by that big tree trunk you made Daddy drag up there."  Jan wasn't a fan of my crude home improvement projects.

"That's the fish cleaning table," I huffed.  "Mother really likes it."

"Well, anyway, she's out there.  Nettie's out there too.  She just drove up."

I took a deep breath and went outside, edging around the corner of the garage and under the shade of the large oak that grew just a few feet from the house.  Mother and Nettie were seated in lawnchairs, talking.  Nettie looked up and smiled, and I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. 

"Hi," I said without much enthusiasm. 

Mother smiled at me and kept on talking about Muleshoe, Texas where Daddy was working now, near Lubbock.  Then she went on about what Neila was doing in Austin and the fact that Elton had started working as the produce manager at Safeway.  You couldn't tell there had been any conflict between us earlier in the day, and I knew she'd never mention it to Nettie or to me, but I wanted to ask her why she never came to check on me, so I sat listening to them, trying to let go of my anger. 

I looked over at the fishcleaning table/treetrunk.  I had dug a hole, then begged Daddy to get the tractor and drag the partial trunk over.  I pictured it having pots of varicolored blooming flowers sitting on it, but in our family pragmatism usually won out over aesthetics, so it became fish over flowers. 

I didn't even like to eat fish.  It smelled too bad, but Mother would stand at the treetrunk, cut their heads off, gut them, scale them, then march inside and cook them.   The death and the eating were way too close in time to each other for me. 

Nettie decided she wanted to fish, so she asked me to get a cane pole from the garage.  She had brought some minnows, which were sitting in a gray metal bucket in the shade under the tree.  She walked slowly out toward the tank in her Daniel Green houseshoes, wearing her huge large brim hat, something like a farmer's sombrero, carrying the pole, while I ambled along with the minnow bucket.

"I'll clean whatever you catch," Mother had called out as she went inside to prepare lunch.

"I don't like to fish," I told Nettie as I tried to trap one of the fast moving minnows for her.  Handing one to her, I watched, wincing as she slipped the hook through the minnow's back.

"Why?" she said, holding the pole up straight, then slinging the line over her head and forward, letting the little minnow land with a "plop" in the dark mossy water.  We watched the red and white cork bob languidly.  Nettie sat down in a faded green  metal lawnchair that we left out by the tank summer and winter.  I pulled its rusty twin beside her though it was heavy and took some effort, dirt and leaves clinging to the curved metal legs. 

"First, I think it's too boring--unless the fish are really biting.  Second, Daddy doesn't ever want us to talk or move around.  He always thinks the fish can hear all the noise and won't bite.  I don't think they're that smart.  And third, I feel sorry for the minnows and the fish.  They look so pitiful, hooks hung in their lips, trying to breathe when they're out of water."  I noticed that I was saying that a lot now--I felt sorry for this thing, that person, that situation.   

"Well, I like fishing, myself, and I didn't even know they had lips," Nettie said, staring placidly at the calm water.  "I don't think the fish feel as much as you think.  Th' end justifies th' means."

"What does that mean?"

"Well, fish are for eatin'.  We have to catch 'em to eat 'em, don't we?"  She laughed her quiet chuckle.
"Ooh, I'm burnin' down!"  She always said that when the rest of us said "burning up". 

A warm breeze wafted across us, but our sweaty shirts stuck to the green paint of the chairs as we leaned forward to watch something nibbling  at Nettie's hook, causing the red and white cork to bobble.  Her knees creaked and popped as she stood up slowly, getting ready.  One, two, three bobs of the cork, she jerked the line to set the hook, then she raised the pole straight up and swung a small bass around and onto the ground. 

"Get the stringer," she instructed as she removed the hook from the fish's lip.  A few drops of red blood spread across the scaly skin like red food coloring.  I looked away.  I pitched the stringer to her, but found some reason to look toward the bawling cows in the pasture.  Then I busied myself groping in the bucket for a minnow which I knew she'd need in a few seconds.  Handing the tiny fish to her, I suddenly decided to go inside and trotted off toward the house. 

"Come inside soon," I yelled back over my shoulder at her like I was her mother.  "It's really hot out here." 

She didn't answer, just sailed the string, the sad little minnow hung  to the hook by its backbone, and the cork, into the water with a tiny splash,  her big hat moving this way and that, trying to keep up with her arm movements.  

Then under my breath, I whispered, "Yeah, I know, I'm burning down." And I laughed all the way to the backdoor.   I took the two steps in one stride opening the screened door simultaneously, bursting through the utility room  into the kitchen.  Mother was standing with her back to me, peeling potatoes.

"Where's Nettie?" she asked, without looking around.

"Out by the tank fishing."

"Catching any?  We could have them for lunch."

"One little one."  I started to say I felt sorry for it, but Mother wouldn't understand that.

 "Mother, I probably wouldn't have run away, even if you had come to look for me," I started. 

"What?" she asked absentmindedly, reaching into the cabinet for salt.  "What are you talking about?"

"Umm, nothing," I decided to say nothing further about it.  I doubted Jan would think it important enough to mention to Mother what I had told her earlier. 

"Okay," she said, still concentrating on the potatoes and reaching to turn on the gas burner. 

That was the day I decided that theatrics didn't work in our family.  No one paid attention to drama, and  if they did, they would just think it was stupid.  I had to come up with a new plan for  getting my point across. 

Mother would listen to Jan because she was the baby; Neila because she was the oldest; Susan was calm, smart, and logical.  I needed to find an ally.  Someone older, someone who would take my part no matter what.  Who was I kidding?  Well, an ally at any rate.

"Well," I thought, "I'm burning down today."  And I headed back out to the tank and took a seat beside my grandmother.  "How old were you when you started going to dances?" I asked, hoping against hope that she'd be truthful.  "And what about wearing makeup?  And shaving your legs?"

At that, she looked over at me with a questioning look and a small grin and settled back into her chair. 

"Oooh, now let's see.  Give those to me slower.  I'm burnin' down."

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/DUCKS, DUCKS, AND MORE DUCKS

DeWitt's story about the duck being wrapped up by a snake, though odd, was just one of many stories about what happened to them once they were in our care.  I felt bad that our home didn't  end up being a safe place for them, but when we decided to get them, we had no idea how often they reproduced, nor did we understand their pushy and inquisitive nature.  Those two traits combined after a while to make them almost unbearable pets.  We just envisioned cute little quackers, floating sublimely and peacefully on the tank, providing photo ops, not the thunderous herd that ran quacking from the tank to the back door angrily demanding food every time we stepped outside.

I'm sure either Jan or I started the appeal for ducks.  Our father liked animals, and certain animals were more than welcome at the ranch, but others he instantly vetoed.  He would have vetoed ducks, but he was gone more of the time than he was home now, traveling for Murray Gin Company, so we didn't ask him. 

Mother became even more independent, and we three girls became more brazen in our requests, knowing that unless it involved bleeding, hurting someone, or setting something on fire, she would usually let us do it. 

"The Georges have the cutest little ducks," Jan said.  "They quack and waddle." Jan was priming the pump.  "So we were thinking...you know.....that maybe we could  just get two or three and put them on the tank to watch them swim and stuff."

"What's the 'and stuff'"? Mother asked.

"Just watch them swim really.  That's all." Susan said, interjecting herself into the conversation.

It was magic.  We were always slow to realize it though.  We often forgot to use Susan, our secret weapon.    Mother would give in to her without even a frown, almost every time.  Maybe it was because she rarely asked for anything, and if she did it was actually logical and sane unlike the requests of a few of her siblings. 

So that was how it was that we traveled the winding  backroad to the George's home four miles away late one fall afternoon.  Mother stayed home doing the million things she now had to do since Daddy had started traveling.

We took a shoebox to put them in .  Susan drove.  She was fifteen and had been driving for about a year.  Franny George was in 7th  grade with me at school, and she chased the ducks until she caught them one by one.  She handed the first one to Jan, who cradled it against her plaid dress.  The second one was mine, and Susan deferred, so the third one was mine too.  I realized then that Susan had no interest in the ducks, but had merely intervened with Mother to help us get what we wanted. 

We transferred them to the shoebox in the back floorboard, and Jan and I crawled in the backseat, leaning down trying to keep them from hopping out of the box.

"I can't wait to put them out on the tank," Jan enthused.

 "You'll have to wait till tomorrow," Susan said quietly.  "Something would get them tonight right away."

"I never thought of that.  We can put them in the coop we used for Julie.  It's made for chickens and ducks, not puppies," I said, remembering Julie's near-death experience, hanging herself in the coop door.

We had turned from the farm to market road onto the dirt road that led back to our house.  About a mile and a half down the road, just around the curve that led to Ventura's house, our car started limping. 

"Oh no, we've got a flat tire." I  heard something in Susan's voice.  I wasn't sure what it was.  The sky was  like gray marble, and night came quickly when it looked like that.

We knew the lady who lived in the little house we were approaching, the only one for at least two miles either direction.  Ventura was a lady who had come from Mexico after  marrying a man from Corsicana.  She raised goats, and often stayed in her little home alone since her husband drove a truck.  At night it could be deathly quiet.  She did ironing for us since Mother didn't have time, and I had often wondered if she was ever scared by herself on that deserted stretch of road. 

"Maybe Ventura is home," Susan said hopefully as she pulled the car as near the ditch as she could get it and turned off the motor.

"I don't see any lights," Jan said.  "I don't think the goats are gonna let us up on the porch to knock on the door."

Susan got out of the car and peered toward the house.  "She's not home," she said authoritatively.
"We've got to walk home."  Jan and I stared at each other.  It was almost dark.  Our house was at least two miles down a dark, treelined road with no houses between Ventura's and ours.

I'm not sure if I really wanted to protect the ducks, or if I just felt safer staying put in the car, but I made a quick, panicky, decision.

"I'll stay with the ducks," I said forcefully.

Susan considered it.  "We've got to get going," she said to Jan.  "It's getting dark fast."

Jan hopped out of the backseat, casting a glance back at the ducks.

She and Susan started walking south on the road at a fast pace.  They didn't  look back.  I squeezed over the seat and locked both the front doors, then crawled over the seat again and locked the back doors.  I rolled up the windows, leaving only a tiny crack at the top of the window on the ditch side of the car.

The darkness seeped around the car like thick smoke, and the darker it got, the more rigid I became.  The ducks scrabbled around in the shoe box and eventually escaped, but I could hardly watch them.  I now had to watch the road south where Susan and Jan had been swallowed up by the darkness, and east, where it curved around where we had come from.  I kept praying that Ventura would show up. 

"Surely she'll be home soon," I thought to myself.  She wouldn't leave the goats very long by themselves.  They'd eat the siding off her house. 

The fear that rose most in my mind was that someone would come along and try to help, and I wouldn't know whether to let them or not.  Most people in the country were good people.  And they especially liked to help people with car troubles, but I wanted to wait till Mother came and said what we should do.

 I was more afraid just of the dark itself and what imagined thing might come out of that forbidding darkness.  I could envision monsters of varying shapes and sizes.  The trees swayed and I could make a different scary shape out of each wave of the branches.  They looked like giant fingers ready to reach down and snatch me.  No, it wasn't people I was scared of;  it was something else, something my own mind invented.

An eternity passed.  How long could it take them to walk two miles?  The ducks were running all over the back floorboards.  I sat rigidly looking south, then east, and occasionally turning toward Ventura's house, hoping against the odds that I'd see a light and discover she was home after all.  Finally, a light was coming slowly down the road toward the car.  It wasn't our pickup, though.  It was someone else. 

What should I do, I wondered, feeling more and more anxious.   What if it was someone I didn't know?  The pickup pulled directly in front of the car, grill to grill.  A man got out.  I couldn't see him in the darkness.  He approached the car, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered into the front seat of the car. 

The anxiety that had risen into my throat rushed out in my cry, "Robert Earl!"  He saw me in the backseat then.

"I'm going to fix the flat.  Your mother called me.  Then I'll drop you by the house--you and the ducks," he said.  He seemed like he wanted to laugh, but he didn't.  He was a very serious person, nice, businesslike, but he didn't laugh much.  I guess running the store kept him with a lot on his mind, especially when people like my mother called him out at night.

When I got home, Susan and Jan told me about the walk home.  They started out, feeling brave, then became increasingly afraid as they saw the shadows of the trees, heard the low moans and groans of the country, the screeches and howls of animals, and thought of snakes and other animals that crossed the roads at night.  So one of them suggested they sing, and they skipped arm in arm down the dusty road singing at the top of their lungs a favorite song from the musical "The King and I". 

"Whenever I feel afraid, I hold myself erect, and whistle a happy tune, so no one will suspect I'm afraid.  While quivering in my shoes, -----I strike a careless pose, and whistle a happy tune, so no one ever knows I'm afraid. The result of this deception is very plain to tell, for when I fool, the people I fear, I fool myself as well."

They sang this, lungs stretched tight, trying to make all the noise they could.  I wondered who they thought they'd fool.  Probably only themselves.

"Mother seemed surprised to see us!"  Susan laughed, thinking of it.  "Like she'd forgotten she had any kids or that they were gone anywhere.  She was washing dishes in the kitchen, singing, with all the lights on in the house and all the windows wide open.  Then she got kind of worried, thinking what she needed to do, but she called Robert Earl, and he said he'd come right on, especially when she told him one of the kids was in the car over there guarding some ducks."

The little ducks were put to bed in the coop for the night, while we slept under the lovely vibrating noise of the huge attic fan.   Early in the evening, it drew warm air through a  large vent in the hall, sucking it through all the bedroom windows, but later, as the temperature eased down during the night, we'd often draw a light blanket up over us, snuggling down, retreating from the cool air. 

1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/ JOE AND THE INDIAN PRINCESS

It was getting harder and harder to stay up with Susan's reading choices. Well, honestly, I couldn't keep up. That was the frustration of it. She read constantly, before school, after school, at night, on the weekends. I definitely did not read on the weekends. Weekends were for spending the night with friends or going to the movies, riding bicycles, or just doing things I enjoyed. Also, the vocabulary was beginning to be over my head.

The latest book was Franny and Zooey, and I didn't even understand what it was talking about most of the time. I'd read little parts of it in a hurry, but lots of the words meant nothing to me, so I couldn't figure out the meaning of certain key sentences, rendering entire pages meaningless. I wasn't sure how long I could keep this up. Or if I wanted to. She showed no signs of slowing down, and I felt like I was reading a foreign language. When did English get so hard?

Lately, I had noticed she and Mother would discuss the books, but they got quiet when I came around. When I tried to join the conversation, mostly by asking a lot of pesky questions about the books, they exchanged looks, then changed the subject.

I knew the latest book dealt with something secretive that I wasn't supposed to know about, but I quietly slipped back near the bedroom door and heard them discussing why one of the characters in the book "committed silverside". That word related to nothing I had experienced or heard.

We had silverfish that made their homes at times in the chest of drawers. They were irritating, but as far as I knew harmless, as they darted swiftly out of sight when you opened a drawer where they were hiding. There were minnow-like fish that Daddy called silversides, I thought. But how did you commit a silverside?

My head hurt. It was just too much for my tiny brain. Susan's brain must be oversized, I decided because she seemed to absorb more and more information while I struggled to unravel the secret words contained between the bookcovers.

I heard the phone ringing and ran to answer it in the hallway that led to our bedrooms.  Jan had beat me to it and answered it in the kitchen.  I listened for a few seconds.

"Mother, it's Uncle Joe.  He's calling from Houston.  He's married an Indian princess and wants you to talk to her," I yelled.   I could hear Jan talking to someone with a slight accent that I couldn't readily identify. 

Mother emerged from the master bedroom, looked at the phone I was extending to her, and rolled her eyes.

"Hello," she said, friendly enough, but not smiling.  "Yes, I'm Joe's sister.  It's nice to talk to you, too.  How do you know Joe?"  A slight hesitation.  "Oh, I see."  She motioned toward the kitchen and whispered to me to get Jan off the phone.  "Yes, yes, he's a great guy," she said, not sounding very convinced.  "Where is Joe?" she asked.  "Yes, I'd like to talk to him.  Can you put him on the line for me, please?"  She would never be rude to someone she hadn't properly met.

"Joe, how are you, honey?"  He was her brother,  eight years younger than she, and since Granny Newlin had gotten tired of raising kids by the time he was born, Mother and her older sister Pat felt a lot of responsibility for the four younger boys.  They still had a really swell dad, but there was a deficit in the mother department. 

There was also Bud,  a fifth brother, who was between the two girls in age, but as far as Mother was concerned, he was on his own.  They were close enough in age to fight with one another as kids though as adults they enjoyed one another's company.

"Joe, where are you today?" Mother asked in a reprimanding tone.  "Yes, that's what I thought.  Well, did you marry this Indian princess?  She sounds like a bar drunk to me."  I could hear Joe's prostestations. 

"Libby, she's the best thing that's happened to me in a long time.  She's a real nice girl."

Joe had problems that seemed to start at least as early as first grade, when he came home crying from the first day of school, declaring that he just couldn't go to school with those other children because "they were too ugly."   He had taxed Granddad's resolve.  He started college at SMU, but never got far, wrecking cars and motorcycles till he was finally cut off financially.  His struggle with alcohol began early and never left him, but he still had a lovely personality, intelligence,  thick curly dark hair, little gold rimmed glasses and an appealing face.  I could see why women fell for him.  And he could tell the best stories and make everyone laugh. 

Once he told us about falling off a destroyer during World War II.  He said he was going to throw himself into the propeller, but my grandmother's face appeared in the gray mist and caused him to hesitate.  At the same time, someone yelled "Man overboard" and he was soon rescued.  We weren't sure if the story was true, but if he hadn't come home from the war, that would have meant Mother would have lost two brothers, since Johnny, the brother next to her in age,  was a navigator on a plane that never returned from a run in the Pacific.

I think Joe had been married a couple of times,  and he was always madly in love by the time he introduced his ladies to Mother, but this time she wasn't accepting it. 

She motioned to me to go away and then partially covered her mouth with her hand and whispered into the phone.  "Go home and sober up, Joe.   Can't you find something else to do on holidays?  It's Thanksgiving weekend for goodness sake.  We want you to come here at Christmas.  Would you do that?  Okay---okay.  Think about it.  I'll send you a bus ticket if you'll come."

 I saw her place the phone slowly on the hook, turn like she'd aged a thousand years in the last minute, and walk with leaden feet toward the kitchen.  By the time she reached the door to the kitchen, though, she perked up, looked at Jan and laughed, shaking her head with a rapid back and forth motion like dogs do when they shake off water. 

"Indian princess, my foot," she said with disgust.

Then she simply walked to the cabinet, got out some corn meal and started making supper.

Joe's relationships never lasted long, so we never got to meet the Indian princess even though he decided to come and visit us that Christmas.  She didn't come with him,  he didn't mention her, and we didn't ask.   His life was a series of people, jobs, and places- -nothing stable save the love of his longsuffering family.  And at the end, someone would notice that he hadn't been seen for a few days, and his kindhearted siblings would make arrangements for him to be interred in a cemetery in Dawson, under a huge oak tree, near some of our family, as he had requested. 





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1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/ CORBET, OUR NEW REALITY

Here are a few of the things that were  different when we moved to Corbet.  Mother acted like these things were just as ordinary as could be, or if pressed, an adventure, so we never questioned anything.  But sometimes someone coming to visit said something about the way things were, and we usually ended up making fun of them after they left and wondering why they were so "picky".

Change #1  This was not bothersome to us at all.  We had no living room furniture.  We didn't care since we had a well-furnished den, and that left the living room, with its large picture window for us to give nightly performances.  Jan and I liked to sing and do our imaginary soft shoe to "Me and My Shadow", observing ourselves noncritically in the clear reflection of the window.  Othertimes, when friends were over, we lined old mattresses made of ticking stuffed with cotton, end to end across the width of the room, then all ran rambunctiously somersaulting and cartwheeling across them.  (I had finallylearned to cartwheel ; I was no longer a dance outcast.)

Change #2  We were one mile from any neighbor, whatsoever.  The gravel road ran exactly one mile from the farm to market road to our house and you could come right on across the cattle guard into the driveway which made a circle in front.  The only other option was to turn left at the cattleguard onto a dirt road, which was okay when it was dry, but a big mistake when it had been raining, which a lot of people thought about too late.  They would show up at the front door wanting someone to pull them out with a tractor.  If it was on the weekend, they were in luck, as usually some of the male members of the family obliged.  If it happened on a weekday, we offered them the phone, and they usually had to make an embarrassing call to someone to come and get them.  The car was left till things dried out a bit.

Change #3  Even though in Purdon, we thought the telephone operator occasionally listened in on conversations, we  were now on an 8 party line.  Eight families!!  Even though my parents had to pay $500 just to get a phone line run to our house.  There weren't any other houses down that way,  and the previous people who lived there, DeWitt and Mattie Wallace didn't have a phone.  My granddad Skinner gave  the land easement for the county road even though it split out about 85 acres of his land from the rest.  But the phone people weren't coming down there without payment.  They didn't really care that my grandfather cleared the way for them to make more money.

Change #4  We had to use tank water for the time being to bathe in.  It had a light green color, not really unpleasant, but sometimes there were small pieces of green moss floating in it.
. 
 Jan and I approached Mother together the first night we had to bathe in that water.    "There are little things in the water.  We don't want to bathe in it."

"Well, I sure hate for you to go to school without a bath--ever," she laughed.  "Let me see what it is."
She walked into the bathroom and peered into the tub.  "Oh that's just a little moss.  It's probably good for your skin.  It certainly won't hurt you."

So we stopped complaining.  I never thought about getting a disease, even when I saw the cows tromping around in the water, slobbering away, their red hides wet and dripping.   We  all remained extraordinarily healthy.  Maybe it was the moss.

 Not too much later, my dad had us help him build a filter system that used gravel and a holding tank.  It didn't work very well, and eventually stopped up (I'm sure it was the moss), and quit working at all.  Then it was a matter of his trying to get city water out there, which eventually happened.

Our Aunt JoAnn was the most vocal about the water.  I think she took a shower when she visited, but she would not have run bathwater.  She seemed horrified.  That describes how she felt about the water situation, but Mother acted like it was the most normal thing in the world, and no, she was not at all worried about the children when JoAnn asked.

 "It's not going to hurt anyone.  It's just water with a little moss in it."

Change #5  Mother had gone to work fulltime.
She  had gone to work for E.W. Hable and Sons Construction Company as a bookkeeper.  The office personnel worked all week and a half day on Saturday.  The company built highways mostly, and  she liked her job and all the people with whom she worked.

"I think I would be bored doing your job," I told her one day, with the thoughtlessness of a child.

"It's not boring at all," she said.  "It's fascinating, like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle.  Each little piece doesn't amount to much, but when you get it all put together, you can see what the pieces represent-the big picture, so to speak." 

 Lots of Saturdays, since Daddy wasn't home to make us get up, we all slept till noon.  (His idea of a fun Saturday was a 6 a.m. start for a cattle roundup.)  Sometimes, Mother would be whizzing into the driveway (she drove a little too fast most of the time because she was always in a hurry), and one of us would yell, "Here she comes!!"

Pajamas, blouses, shorts, and  jeans, went flying in all directions in the bedrooms, and by the time she pulled into the garage and entered the kitchen through the backdoor, all three of us had zoomed into the kitchen, where we met her like we had been up all day. 

"Hi Mother.  Do we need to get groceries out of the car?" Susan asked.

" Anything we can help with?" I asked, trying to seem sincere.

"What's for lunch?"  Jan piped up.  We both gave her dirty looks.

I think she knew our deceit, but she never called us on it.  Once I had confessed to her that we probably should do more at home, but she said, "You're only a kid once.  There'll be plenty of time to do all that other stuff once you're grown."

In the summers, though, Neila came home from UT where she had lived in  Halstead  House, a girls' co-op, where they all shared duties, and she organized us in the same fashion in order to help Mother.

It was the first day of June 1960,  and Neila made and distributed the schedule.  We were all silent as we studied both the chore list and every place that our name was written in the small squares on the notebook paper.  We would do  chores five days per week.  We got a reprieve on weekends.

My most hated chore involved water.  Since we did not have any purified water coming in through the faucets, only tank water,  we hauled Corsicana city water in a huge reservoir  from my grandmother's house.  It had to be transferred for drinking water use into a 30 gallon Igloo water  cooler which sat on a stool next to the sink in the kitchen.  Filling the cooler was accomplished by carrying a metal two-gallon pitcher of water fifteen times  from outside at the galvanized tank to inside, where the cooler sat, reaching up and dumping the contents with a large splash. 

Vacuuming, mopping, cleaning the bathrooms, and dusting comprised the remainder of the chore list.  None of us had to cook.  We all knew we didn't want to eat our own cooking, and we looked forward to Mother's meals anyway.  Neila didn't like to cook very much either, so thankfully she didn't insist on that being one of the chores.

Simultaneous with the appearance at the front door of one of my dad's good friends,  the man who formerly lived in the house that was now our den and kitchen, I burst into tears as I realized that the schedule was definitely not fair.  I curled into a fetal ball in an old comforting brocade rocker, crying and rocking myself.

"What's the matter, honey?" DeWitt Wallace asked me, coming over to the chair and leaning to pat me on the shoulder.  His quick, wiry movements belied the white hair that formed a ring around the base of his head.  He was short and there was no fat on him at all.  His arms still had muscles that you could see when he flexed them to do something.  I never knew how old he was.  It didn't seem to matter.  He could do anything men much younger could do, and probably lots they couldn't. 

"We've got chores assigned," I wailed.  "And I have more than anybody else."  It wasn't true, but I had developed a martyr complex, and when it kicked in, I just had to release myself to it.  I wasn't a drama queen;  I really believed myself, but I was chagrined that DeWitt had caught me in my little tantrum.

He looked at Neila, who seemed slightly embarrassed at my behavior, and he smiled, chewing the end of his cigar.
"Well," he grinned, his raspy voice kind, "I'll bet your big sister will fix it all fair and square for you."

At those words, I looked up questioningly at Neila, more tears forming and ready to spill from my eyes like miniature waterfalls.

"It's exactly fair," she said reasonably.  "You're reading it wrong.  I'll show you in a minute."

I sighed.  She was usually right.  I was interested in what DeWitt was telling now, so I momentarily forgot my despair.

"I just wanted to tell you what happened to one a' them ducks," he laughed.

 He had fed our ducks while we were gone for five days.

 "One of 'em was missin' fer three days, so I decided I'd look a little more for it and went behind the tank dam.  There that duck was with a water mocassin wrapped around it."  He regripped his cigar in the left corner of his mouth.  " I killed the snake, and the duck waddled off, a little woozy, but all right."

"Dangedest thing I ever saw," he laughed.  "Nobody would believe that, but it's the truth." 

We knew it was true, though, because DeWitt said it.

We saw water mocassins all the time in the tank 30 yards from the house.  One day I had run barefoot across the tank dam to the barn to turn on a faucet to run water for the cows in the corral.  As I ran back across the dam toward home, I suddenly saw an old black bicycle tire and hopped nimbly over it, only to realize it had not been there on the way over.  Still running, glancing back over my right shoulder, I saw it slither toward the murky water and slide beneath the green moss. 

The shivers seemed to start at my shoulders and work their way up my neck until the entire back of my head felt like an electric shock had been applied to my scalp. 

"Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh," I grunted loudly, now leaping like a gazelle, putting distance between myself and the snake.  "Oooooh, that makes me sick.   I'm scared to death of snakes."  I'm not sure who I was talking to, just myself, I guess.  No one was around. 

After DeWitt left, Neila interpreted the schedule for me and I was pacified.  Then she announced to all of us,  "In addition to the regular schedule, we are going to paint the outside of the house."  The house was a long white frame,  about 2500 square feet with a large two car garage.  I was all out of tears, so I just sat in stunned silence.  Susan and Jan didn't say anything, so I wondered if they were even planning to help.

Actually, it wasn't so bad.  Every morning, we went out before it got  hot and  painted a section.  And once she knew we were going to take part, Neila told us that we'd be paid a little each week.  For some reason, Jan didn't get paid.  I guess the contributions of a four foot tall seven year-old didn't add up to much. 

It was okay, until the day I asked Susan, as we stroked  paint onto the worn boards,  "How much will you make this week?  How many hours have you worked?"  I hadn't been let in on the secret that Jan wasn't getting paid. 

She looked up at us from her decidedly lower vantage point, and I saw her ivory skinned face flush with anger.  She didn't say anything, just stood up, put her  brush down on the lid of the paint can and stomped off. her blonde hair bouncing as hard as hair can, against her shoulders.

Later, when we came in the house for lunch, she said defiantly, "I may be  seven, but I'm not stupid."  It was nearly the end of the summer anyway.  I figured Mother would give her $5 when she found out what had happened.

Before long, it became a challenge to see if we could finish, and eventually, we got the whole thing painted, and I remember feeling very proud of accomplishing that, though I doubt I shared it with any of my friends.  I wasn't sure they'd be impressed.  Maybe they'd feel sorry for me having to work so hard, or maybe they'd think I was stupid to be proud of doing it.  Neither appraisal appealed to me, so I just secretly thought of it and how good it made me feel, but I didn't talk about it with any of the kids once school started and I entered fifth grade. 

Neila left for college in Austin and poor Mother was on her own again for the household maintenance.  I know neither Susan, Jan nor I kept up the chore chart.

"Well," I rationalized, at times when I thought I should help Mother more.  "I'll have plenty of time to do all that when I'm grown up.  Hadn't Mother said so?"


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